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Issue 11

Coloured Aliens

Prologue and Scene 1

Coloured Aliens is slated for production at La Mama theatre in April 2017 as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. These excerpts are from the script-in-development.

‘At the present time in Sydney, we have whole streets which are practically given up to the businesses conducted by Chinese, Syrians, and other coloured aliens, and one cannot go today into more than five towns of any importance in the country districts of New South Wales without finding two, three, or perhaps half-a-dozen coloured storekeepers apparently doing a thriving business’ – John Watson 1901.

PROLOGUE

Martial arts Gi’s (martial arts ‘kimonos’) hang in various places.

MAI is sitting with a laptop, wearing a grey velour tracksuit. She pivots between two characters, Mrs Ly and a Male Customer.

MAI as MRS LY: A little more.

MAI as MALE CUSTOMER: No.

MAI as MRS LY: You have a little bit more.

MAI as MALE CUSTOMER: I can’t.

MAI as MRS LY: Why, you don’t like?

MAI as MALE CUSTOMER: I’m full, I really am.

MAI as MRS LY: Who you think you talk to?

MAI as MALE CUSTOMER: Ms Ly, you are the most famous pho cook this side of/

MAI as MALE CUSTOMER: Please Mrs Ly - you’re getting this wrong. (Tries a more sinister version) Our shop is new and big, and has more lights. They like to come to my restaurant. My restaurant! Mine. My!

MAI as MRS LY: (Shoves food into his mouth. They struggle). Who you work for?

KEVIN: Where’s the cheese? And the ham? Where’s the chicken? (Silence) I’m so hungry! I’m going to bite you!

MAI laughs at him. KEVIN takes a protein shake from the fridge; the shakes it, threatening to splatter the milk and protein everywhere. Finally, he drinks it.

MAI: When are you going?

KEVIN: I’m going to the gym at one. Ju-jitsu at four. Then night shift.

KEVIN takes one of the clean martial arts Gi’s hanging in the space and shoves it in his bag. An email arrives. MAI quickly reads it.

MAI: Fuck! I’m so sick of Asian actors.

KEVIN: (Ironic) They just want to play stereotyped roles?

MAI: Viet Cong.

KEVIN: Prostitute.

MAI: Fu Manchu.

KEVIN: Ming the Merciless.

MAI: Boat person.

KEVIN: Drug peddler.

MAI: People smuggler.

KEVIN: Yellow Peril.

MAI: Sexy monk, Tripitaka.

KEVIN: (In character) The Nature of Monkey is irrepressible...

MAI: No. They’re so hard to find. There’s so few of them. And the good ones get poached!

KEVIN: What’s happened?

MAI: He’s been offered a role in a mini series...playing a drug addict in an Indonesian prison. And now he wants to pull out of my play!

KEVIN: Find someone else.

MAI: It’s a week away! I can’t believe it! (Continues reading the email) "It is really the casting agent who’s pressuring me - She even warned me: ‘You are making a terrible mistake! You silly, silly boy! Do you know how important this film Director is?’"

KEVIN: Okay Mai, how can I help? Who do I have to give a talking to?

MAI: ...I’ve been working on this play for five years! And now she wants to poach my actor a week before opening.

KEVIN: (Trying to lighten things up) I could play the Pho customer being force-fed by Mrs Ly. With enough make-up and some sticky tape.

MAI: (Types out her reply)...This puts me in an impossible position, and will cause the play to be canceled. (Presses send).

MAI reads out the Email response: Yeah I’m really sorry about that.

MAI: You know the theatre world is very small, and based on reputations and long memories...

MAI reads out the Email response: It’s nothing personal, film offers more exposure.

MAI: Um, I was getting abused by my classmates for getting 98% on tests. I had to pretend to be bad at maths, okay?

KEVIN: And now it’s true.

MAI: Oh dear.

KEVIN: Fly-in Fly-out workers during the mining boom? Destruction of the Great Barrier Reef? (Silence). What can you write about?

MAI: I can write about what it feels like to live as a ‘Generic Asian’ since I was six.

KEVIN: When you say Generic, I think of the Asian guy who does the dry-cleaning, or the Asian girl who sells sushi, or the Asian girl in hot pants and love-heart glasses heading into ‘Far Eastern’. Or the Asian guy who cleans the sanitary bins in the toilets at my work.

MAI: (Not convinced) That’s sort of it...

KEVIN: Is it what you guys do that makes you all the same?

MAI: We’re assumed to be the same because no matter whether we’re from Hong Kong, Cambodia, we’re treated the same. A Cambodian person’s skin is different to a Thai person’s! A Filipino person’s nose is different to a Chinese person’s. (Pause). Do you get it?

KEVIN: No?

MAI: You have no idea how it feels to be treated purely on your skin colour, on your race, and not actually be an individual, for people to not actually see Kevin? For people to go, "Oh, there’s that white man, he must do that thing...he must eat heaps of burgers, and...and work...with a ‘white’ collar".

KEVIN: Don’t exaggerate.

MAI: When I cross the road I feel threatened because I think if I don’t cross the road fast enough I’m going to get run over. Where as, if I were Kevin, I would have all the time in the world. Because deep down, no one gives a shit about the Asian girl walking down the street - she probably doesn’t know anybody, she wouldn’t know what her rights are, she should feel lucky to even be in this country.

KEVIN: Come on, is that true?

MAI: Yes! I’m not kidding Kevin.

KEVIN: I don’t even notice you’re Asian anymore. You’re just Mai.

MAI: Thank you! But other people aren’t like that. When I call a large arts organisation to follow up on an email, they’re surprised I can even speak English - like I just wrote my email from some fucking dictionary! That someone with a name like mine shouldn’t be able to ‘talk Australian, mate.’ Or when I’m at a fancy restaurant, people assume I’m the wait staff, because I’m Asian and female so I must be into serving and shit.

KEVIN: Give me a break. If you’re born in Braybrook, your father isn’t going to even be a Driving Instructor, you know that? Don’t think you have a monopoly on disadvantage.

MAI: I write ‘Vietnamese issues’ because there were no books, or TV shows, or plays with people like me when I was a kid. There was the odd Asian character written by a white man, but it was like reading about Unicorns!

KEVIN: It’s not about colour, it’s about having money and connections in this country. And you can be white and dirt poor for generations, and no one will give a shit about you. They’re not going to run community arts projects for you...

MAI: Well they will, but they’ll photograph the black kid for their publicity.

Issue 11

About the author

Chi Vu is an award-winning playwright and author. Her plays include the critically acclaimed and widely studied A Story of Soil (2000, 2002), Vietnam: a Psychic Guide (2003) and Banh Chung installation performance (2013). These works are bilingual and/or bicultural. As part of her Masters in Writing for Performance at the Victorian College of the Arts, Chi began creating transcultural work that uses popular genres such as horror that allow audiences to viscerally experience themes of repressed cultural identity and inherited trauma. Her play The Dead Twin (2015) premiered at Footscray Community Arts Centre in partnership with Theatre Works and VCA.

Chi's postcolonial gothic novella Anguli Ma (2012) was short-listed for a NSW Premier’s Literary Prize. Chi's other prose work appears in Joyful Strains: Making Australia Home, Growing up Asian in Australia and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature.

Chi has worked with a range of companies, including FCAAC, La Mama, Theatre Works, Playwriting Australia, Melbourne Theatre Company, Metanoia Theatre, Multicultural Arts Victoria, Kultour, Performance 4A, North Melbourne Arts House, Creative Victoria, ACMI and the University of Melbourne. She is currently completing a Creative Writing PhD at Victoria University on genre tropes in translingual creative writing. www.chi-vu.com